AWS IAM and Permissions Cheat Sheet

What is this page about?

A quick-reference cheat sheet for AWS IAM as tested across the certification exams (Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate, Developer, SysOps, and Security Specialty). It covers the core components, users, groups, roles, and policies, with their credential types and best uses, IAM policy JSON structure, managed versus customer policies, STS and role assumption, cross-account trust, least-privilege best practices, and common exam scenarios, plus tools like Access Advisor and the Policy Simulator.

What has been corrected on this page?

Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

1. 11 July 2026 · corrected by Melik Can Sariyer

   1 flagged claim verified: a direct quote attributed to unnamed 'AWS certification instructor guidance' is untraceable to any real source. The underlying technical guidance (use IAM roles, never hardcode access keys) is accurate AWS best practice, so kept the content and removed the unverified attribution.

   Before

   A direct quote attributed to unnamed "AWS certification instructor guidance" that is untraceable to any real source.

   After

   De-attributed the quote to plain prose, keeping the accurate underlying AWS best-practice guidance (use IAM roles on EC2/Lambda, never hardcode access keys).

   Why: Applied fact-check fix: removed an unverified attribution to an unnamed source while preserving the accurate technical guidance.

   View the full record →

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